I am just emailing to thank you for your bravery in calling out Jill Biden’s arrogance in daring to label herself a doctor. As you say, ‘A wise man once said that no one should call himself “Dr” unless he has delivered a child’. Exactly. Only real doctors deliver children. Okay, sure, these days only obstetricians qualify for that description – midwives too, but they don’t count because they’re women. Plus, you were clearly being metaphoric – just like when you say that anyone with a PhD who refers to themselves as ‘Dr’ is ‘bush league’ (a.k.a. female).

What follows is an annotated bibliography of my publishing history where I aim to provide an honest account of every peer-reviewed manuscript I’ve written, including the ones that didn’t get published, the ones that took years and endless rounds of reviews to get published, and the ones that probably shouldn’t have been published at all.

My opponent wants you to believe that no one else cares about the coming bird apocalypse.  But the truth of the matter is that the bird apocalypse has already happened and I’ve been talking about it for years.  As a Canadian-born lifelong defender of the American Constitution, I can definitively say that the bird apocalypse began in 1973. 

I wanna talk to you about what’s happening to our country.  Our country is in serious trouble.  I’m not prejudiced.  Anyone who knows me knows I’m not prejudiced, but let’s be honest here: they are ruining America.  Every year they come here.  They’re mostly not from here but they come here in waves and they shit all over us.  I mean, they literally shit all over us. Plus, they’re horrible, they’re disgusting.  Some of them, I assume, are decent, but most of them carry diseases. 

When I discovered you a couple of years ago, I was immediately enamoured.  Here was a website dedicated to the principles of open access that would enable me to share my research with members of the public.  Here was a site that allowed me to control my profile and add and delete material at will—unlike my own academic institution, where adding a paper or updating my profile is a task so unwieldy and complicated, I rarely bother.  Here was a site that would expose me to the work of academics I might otherwise never have heard of.  Plus, it looked like the younger, hipper sibling of ResearchGate, which, as far as I could ascertain, was populated primarily by nerdy scientists.

I was very excited to receive your email invitation this morning and I’m sorry to hear that you’ve been trying unsuccessfully to reach me by phone.  It’s so flattering to know that I am one of only a “small selected number of researchers and institutes around the globe” you’ve approached with your exciting offer to translate my research. 

Every morning I open up my email with a sense of anticipation.  Who will I receive an invitation from today? Will it be Obesity Research, which is a topic at least tangentially related to stuff I have actually published on, or the International Journal of Marine Science and Ocean Technology, which has clearly not bothered to do its homework.  However, I can’t help feel, dodgy open access journals, that you’ve stopped even pretending to look legitimate. 

You and I don’t see eye to eye on many things (well, most things; probably 99% of things), but I want to take the opportunity to thank you for opening my eyes to the true nature of soccer.  Now I should confess up front that I’m not an American (or even an ‘American’), so I know my opinion doesn’t count, but your recent columns spoke to me on a gut level.  Actually, even lower – more like the bowel region.